“I need to know by tonight. Noon is better,” Doyle said.
“You give me very little time.”
“Nobody has any time,” Doyle said. “Give me hints, rumors, a whisper . . . anything.”
“I make no promises.”
“Do what you can.” Doyle slid a folded banknote across the table. It was covered smoothly and instantly by a slender, well-kept hand. The younger man rose from his bench and left like an amiable snake setting off to swallow barn rats.
At the tavern door he brushed past Bernardo Baldoni, entering.
Bernardo stepped to one side and stood with his back to the window, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, giving Doyle a long moment to look him over. Then he threaded his way around two tables to the shadowy corner behind the bar.
He sat on the bench recently vacated and set his hands in plain view. Bernardo was not a large or imposing man. He looked even less so when sitting across from the mass of muscle that was William Doyle. He said, “Mr. Doyle,” and it was a statement, not a question.
Doyle frowned. “I know you.”
“We met once, ten years ago, in Paris, over cards. I was a corn factor from Marseilles. You were a German count.”
Neutrality settled over Doyle’s ugly face. “Right.”
“The card game was at the Palais Royal. The play was high. We were both cheating.”
“That’s ordinary enough. Cheating.” Doyle took up his mug and drank ale, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and waited.
“So I thought. Until I noticed you were cheating to lose.”
“Looked that way, did it?”
“I sensed a complicated scheme in play, and it was not one of my own, so I withdrew with all prudent speed. Paris was full of political plots and plans at that time. Most of them ended badly for someone.”
“Still true,” Doyle said amiably.
“There was a murder in that club that night. A political murder. I was sufficiently intrigued that I made inquiries and discovered who you are.”
“Did you, now?”
“The British Service remains impenetrable. Your Military Intelligence is less so.”
“I’ve been told that.”
Bernardo motioned the barmaid closer and ordered coffee. “The military are a great trial to us all.”
The two men sat, measuring each other, till the woman returned to swipe at a patch of table with her apron and slap down a mug.
When she was gone again, out of earshot, Doyle said, “The coffee’s a mistake.”
Bernardo sipped. Grimaced. “So it is.” He set it carefully aside. “A reminder that I am among the English. No other nation would call this coffee.”
“We’re an imaginative race,” Doyle said.
Bernardo leaned back in his chair. For a while they watched the other patrons of the Crocodile eat and drink. The tavern collected a mixed bag of workmen connected with the theater, laborers, market vendors, and women of various degrees of respectability.
Bernardo said, “You may know who I am.”
Doyle made no comment.
“So.” Bernardo turned a hand palm up. “I am Bernardo Baldoni, brother to Cesare Baldoni.” He paused. “I see that you knew.”
Doyle didn’t acknowledge that but didn’t deny it, either.
“I have come to deliver a message to the British Service.” Bernardo’s voice became less genial. “You take an interest in the woman called Camille Leyland. This must cease.”
“Why?” The single blunt word from Doyle.
“She is ours. She is Baldoni. She is my great-niece.”
Doyle closed his eyes. “I see.” A minute passed in silence. “Tell me she isn’t also Cesare Baldoni’s great-niece.”
“She is his granddaughter. His only granddaughter. I think it is best that the British Service know this.”
“Hell.”
“She is also Ernesto Targioni’s granddaughter. Add to this that she is Scipione Zito’s first cousin and closest blood relative. You know what he is. I have not even begun to list the families she is tied to by blood and marriage across Tuscany. The Minutoli. The Scribanos . . .”
“In short, related to everybody but the pope.”
“There is a distant connection to—”
“Damn.”
“As I say, you should know this.”
Doyle hissed out a long breath of impatience. “What the devil was a Baldoni child—that Baldoni child—doing unprotected, getting scooped up by the Police Secrète and put in the Coach House? Why the hell weren’t you keeping watch on her?”
“Disorder beyond belief, and one man’s unforgivable villainy. It is a family matter.” Bernardo set the tips of his fingers together and looked down at them. “It is the family matter of several important families, in fact.”
“And again, I have to say damn it to hell.”
“You have an understanding of the politics of Tuscany. Cesare declared there would be no vendetta with the Targioni. We all assiduously covered over that ugliness. Now, unless it is seen that my niece is most abundantly cared for and happy, the old scandal will emerge into daylight.”
Doyle closed his eyes and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Accompanied by a certain amount of bloodshed.”
“It is Tuscany,” Bernardo said. “And it is family.”
“The bloodshed happening in French territory, when our peace treaty with France is shaky as hell. It’s going to look like England’s making trouble on purpose.”
Bernardo said, almost apologetically, “You are not the only one who finds this a difficult situation. You see the implications, do you not?”
“I see the implications.”
“For the Baldoni, for all the old Tuscan families of power, she is a lit candle tossed into a powder magazine.”
“Which the French will blame on us.”
“The small blessing of this day is that my great-niece is under my roof again, instead of in a British prison, accused of spying for the French. Or dead at British hands.”
Doyle looked past him, at a blank spot on the plaster wall. “We wouldn’t kill her.”
“Of course your Service would not,” Bernardo said. “Perhaps the blundering Military Intelligence of England also would not. But I am Tuscan and Florentine and we scent intrigue in the lightest breeze. No one in Italy will believe she spent ten years in England and the British Service did not know who she was. If my great-niece trips over a stone, or is struck by lightning in Hyde Park, or walks in the rain and catches pneumonia, the English will be blamed. That one death will drive the great families of Tuscany into the arms of Napoleon.”
“We’ll have to keep her alive, then, won’t we?”
“With the aid of various saints. Con l’aiuto dei santi.”
The two men looked at each other for a time.
Doyle picked up his mug. “I’d suggest the ale in this establishment, but I imagine you don’t drink it. Has she told you what she’s doing tomorrow?”
“She goes to face Il Mercante di Tenebre. I do not stand in her way. Baldoni women have always fought. She honors us when she goes to face that beast.”
“But it would be best if she didn’t get herself killed on English soil.”
“Very much so. Your Mr. Paxton is in my kitchen, where the coffee is somewhat better than this,” he tapped his cup, “plotting to keep her alive.” He pursed his lips and continued, “It has occurred to us that Mr. Paxton may present a solution to another problem.”
Doyle waited. It was impossible to know if he suspected what was coming.
Bernardo said, “My Sara is heiress to inheritances in two great families—possibly the Zitos as well. She will have also the dowry of her grandmother, who was Maria Vezzoni . . .”
“There is just no end to this, is there?” said Doyle, looking sour.
“She must marry, and soon, to a family who will not cause troubles with this great inheritance. Someone tied to neither the French nor the Austrians. It has occurred to us that an Englishman may be the solution to our problems.”
Doyle didn’t give anything away on his face. “It might.”